by Charles Lear
In last week’s blog we looked at evidence that seems to support the idea that self-proclaimed disinformation agent, Richard Doty, who was a special agent with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, was acting on his own. We also looked at evidence that seems to support the idea and that William Moore, an author and UFO researcher who confessed to being in a partnership with Doty, was driven by the desire to make some money from the information Doty was giving him in exchange for his cooperation. Together, they put many UFO researchers into a state of confusion. We ended with the introduction of the “Majestic-12 Papers” into the UFO community.
In January 1985, Jaime Shandera, a friend of Moore’s who would later appear in several UFO documentaries listed as “Self-Documentary Filmmaker” and “Self-Investigative Reporter” and whose only credit on IMBD as a professional moviemaker is as “video” for the movie, “The Devil’s Rain,” received an envelope in the mail with an Albuquerque postmark. Inside was a roll of film. On the film were images of what has become known as the “Eisenhower Briefing Document.” There was also a letter from Harry Truman to James Forrestal with Truman’s signature on it. The total number of pages was eight.
The pages of the EBD are all stamped “TOP SECRET/MAJIC EYES ONLY.” The front page has the title, “Briefing Document: Operation Majestic 12 Prepared For President Elect Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the date, 10 November, 1952. A warning on the bottom states that “EYES ONLY ACCESS” is “strictly limited to those possessing Majestic-12 clearance level.”
The second page lists the names of the members of the Majestic-12 group. Included among the twelve names given are Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, Dr. Vannevar Bush, and Dr. Donald Menzel, an astrophysicist renowned for being a UFO debunker.
Page 3 begins with a description of Kenneth Arnold’s June 24, 1947 sighting. Then, there is a description of a recovery operation “in a remote region of New Mexico located approximately seventy-five miles northwest of Roswell Army Air Base” where wreckage and four alien bodies were recovered.
The documents were released to the press by Moore on May 28, 1986, and there were stories about them in the New York Times and Washington Post. Researchers who were familiar with Moore, such as Brad Sparks, Barry Greenwood, and Robert Hastings were skeptical and have written extensively about their doubts and investigations into the authenticity of the documents and the validity of Moore’s claims.
Philip Klass, publisher of Skeptics UFO Newsletter, wrote a concise summation in the March 1997 issue that tells the story of the efforts of researchers to get to the truth. Klass takes the position that the documents were faked (as do Greenwood, Sparks, and Hastings) and that Moore was in on it.
According to Klass, Moore told Sparks on April 16, 1983, that he and Stanton Friedman “had run into a dead end” in trying to find out who might have been involved in the recovery of the Roswell debris and “subsequent later events.” Moore made the suggestion to Sparks that fake GOVERNMENT documents could be created that might induce people to come forward. Sparks called Friedman and “was shocked” to find that Friedman was for the idea. Klass quotes from the 1994 book, The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, by Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt: “According to Friedman, among others, Moore had suggested as early as 1982 that he wanted to create Roswell documents, thinking it might open doors that were closed.”
Klass suggests that Doty might have inspired Moore’s idea. He then provides information on Doty. According to him, Doty was assigned to work in counter-intelligence at a West German AFOSI post and was dismissed from AFOSI within two years “for turning in bogus claims about his activities.” He served at Kirtland AFB as the manager of the mess hall for non-commissioned officers for the last two years before his retirement.
According to Klass, Moore first showed the Majestic-12 papers to researcher Lee Graham. Graham made FOIA requests where he mentioned “Majestic-12” and listed the members of the group. Graham’s habit of sharing his FOIA letters with his fellow researchers got rumors going about the existence of MJ-12 and that there was documentation that showed there really was a flying saucer recovered at Roswell.
The first person to write about MJ-12 was Barry Greenwood. Greenwood talked to Graham and then published the list of MJ-12 members in the December 1985 issue of Just Cause, along with a biography for each of them.
Klass brings up what he “suspects” was Moore’s plan “for exploiting the MJ-12 papers.” He published “snippets of information from the papers” in his newsletter, Focus and told readers it came from high-level sources in intelligence. The problem was that once the papers were finally revealed to his fellow researchers and the media, because Moore was the obvious beneficiary in terms of book sales, speaking fees and appearances, this would arouse suspicion that Moore had a hand in the creation of the documents if they were discovered to have been hoaxed.
Klass wrote that a solution to this problem came when Moore met British UFO researcher Timothy Good in May of 1986. Moore made an arrangement with Good that Good could publish the papers in his book, Above Top Secret, which was scheduled to be put out in July 1987. Not only would this make it look like both Moore and Good got the documents independently from a source or sources in the intelligence community, the documents would receive immediate international coverage.
Moore and Friedman were scheduled to speak on June 14, 1987, at the 24th Annual UFO Conference (sponsored by Moore) in Burbank, California, and it was announced that they would “reveal some very startling material.” Unfortunately for them, Good’s publisher decided to hold a press conference on May 29th of that year and feature the book’s MJ-12 documents. Good informed Moore of his publisher’s plans and Moore had to scramble to release his copies first. He got them to the media on May 28, just one day before the British press conference.
Klass is infamous among UFO researchers as an arch debunker. However, in this case, his conclusions are supported by the writings of Sparks, Greenwood, and Hastings with Hastings being the only one of the three convinced that there was an official U.S. Air Force disinformation program involved in promoting the MJ-12 story. In his essay, MJ-12—The Hoax That Quickly Became a Disinformation Operation, Hastings wrote this:
“While [Barry] Greenwood and [Kevin] Randle believe that a simple hoax, designed to make money, was perpetrated by researcher Bill Moore and U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) Special Agent Richard Doty, I contend the available evidence strongly suggests that the MJ-12 fraud, while originating as a hoax, was quickly co-opted by AFOSI and perhaps other intelligence groups, as a means to disinform/misdirect ufologists and the public-at-large, regarding the nature and extent of the U.S. government’s involvement with the UFO phenomenon.”
Next week: The Aviary and UFO Cover-Up? Live!